Allison Dennis, a graduate student in the department of biomedical engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology, was awarded the Ocean Optics Young Investigator Award Sunday at SPIE's Photonics West 2008, held this week in San Jose, Calif., at a Colloidal Quantum Dots for Biomedical Applications conference for the paper, "Quantum dot-fluorescent protein FRET probes for protease activity assays," coauthored by Gang Bao of Georgia Tech. Rob Randelman, president Left to right: Randelman, Dennis, Osinski and Yamamoto. (Photo: SPIE) of Ocean Optics, presented the award of $1000 for Dennis and $1000 to her program at Georgia Tech. The award selection was made by conference chairs Marek Osinski of the University of New Mexico, Thomas Jovin of the Max-Planck-Institut fur biophysikalische Chemie and Kenji Yamamoto of the International Medical Center of Japan. Photonics West 2008 news